A Transversal Escape: Hybrid

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Hybrid :

Transversal peregrinations can lead us to the hybrid character of many artistic approaches: a hybrid object cannot be definitively classified in a particular domain. For a long time artists worked already on forms situated at the borders between different artistic domains: sound and/or graphic poetry, musical theatre, musical graphic scores, sound sculptures, etc. In creating hybrid artistic objects, they tried to differentiate themselves from the dominant notion of the autonomy of art and of the strict separation between dance, music, theatre and visual arts. This idea of composite object includes any artistic act that mixes and intertwines at least two usually separated domains of thought. It is not a matter of a simple superimposition of specialties combined in some performance, as for example with the opera, but effectively of an act or an object that can be interpreted by the public as being part of either domain or both domains at the same time. An example of this is the idea of typoésie developed by Jérôme Peignot, which combines the visual characteristics of typography with the poetry contained in the grouping of letters, mixing indissolubly background and form. This practice, very common to avant-garde movements of the 20th Century, can be perceived at the same time as poetry (text), visual arts (signs distributed in space) and music (rhythm of the scattered signs and onomatopoeias).

Concerning the definition of hybrid, several Internet pages and dictionaries give us the following information: which comes from a natural or artificial crossbreeding between two different entities (synonym: mixed, metis, crossed), and in a metaphorical sense, which does not belong to any particular genre, which is strangely composed of diverse, disparate and surprising elements (heteroclite, composite, illegitimate).

It is possible to qualify artistic practice in general as a “multiform hybrid of tinkering about in context”. Terms like “plural” or “multiple” could also be proposed, but these adjectives are already largely used to qualify artistic “professional jobs”, which are often removed from the practices and ways of making things of all those who, sometimes without speaking about it, make music, make dance, make graphisms, etc., while cheerfully tinkering about (Claude Levi-Strauss) or poaching (Michel de Certeau). Artistic practices can be broken into six different types of activity, to be “distinguished in order to be better linked” (this felicitous expression, which points out the goal of an analysis that breaks practice up into its component parts, is inspired by the writings of Edgar Morin and Edouard Glissant): creation, performance, mediation/education, research, administration, technical aspects/making instruments. There are no boundaries in between them, they spread in continuity in intercrossing edges, they are shifty and very often superimposed. Our hypothesis is that each artistic practice is hybridized by all the different types of interactions. And all these at all times claim a jubilatory manner of going about things!

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